The Pixel Watch has a calorie problem.
With the Pixel Watch, Google is leaning hard into its Fitbit ownership, making the service a prominent part of its wearables and health features. Fitbit immediately brings some valuable brand recognition to the smartwatch, but it’s also a name that carries some expectations with it, occupying such a niche in the market. Unfortunately, the Pixel Watch doesn’t seem to live up to Fitbit’s reputation and often reports calorie estimates.
As new Pixel Watch owners began using their hardware, they quickly found that the wearable’s Fitbit software displayed calorie counts far higher than they expected. Several members of the Android Police team observed similar behavior. Personally, for some activities I’m watching the Fitbit on the Pixel Watch gives me calorie estimates that are 50% higher than the Samsung Health and Watch 4 — I put one on each wrist for direct comparison. is worn, and find the same gap between their report.
Calorie reviews from Pixel Watch + Fitbit (left), Galaxy Watch 4 + Samsung Health (right).
An important element to consider right here is that no smartwatch or health tracker measures energy directly. Instead, they collect data such as steps taken, your heart rate, and possibly distance traveled via GPS, and combine this with the information provided about your physical makeup. are height, weight, gender, and age. Converting this to a simple number like “calories burned” requires a bit of algorithmic wizardry, so it’s understandable that there will be a certain amount of variance between platforms. But even that said, the scope of what we’re seeing with the Pixel Watch, and the scale of its deviation seems out of the ordinary.
We’ve been in touch with Google about our observations, and the Watch team is aware of the issue. Earlier this week we were advised that a restart should help resolve the issue. Repeating the earlier tests, though, we’re still seeing roughly the same difference as when we first started using the smartwatch. Users in Fitbit’s support forum were given the same reboot advice, and reported largely unchanged for them, after the same reboot.
Since this issue is almost certainly in software, we’re hopeful that a fix is possible, but the question is, how long will we have to wait to get it? Until it arrives, Pixel Watch customers chance to make fitness choices primarily based totally on erroneous data, and anyone who diets or otherwise tracks calories should think twice about Fitbit. What is the app reporting?
